Matthew Warshauer, a Central Connecticut State University history professor and author, said that an investigation into post-traumatic stress disorder among Civil War veterans met a dead end when DMHAS refused to release 100-year-old medical records of troubled, but long-dead men who died in state care.

Patricia Rehmer, commissioner of DMHAS, said she is willing to compromise on legislation this year, but only if the names of state veterans are redacted.

"Frankly, we can give people access with proper redactions, so, why would somebody need to know somebody's name, for example?" she said. "This is a position we feel pretty strongly about."

Warshauer said that Rehmer, whose department quietly pushed through an amendment to exempt the records back in 2011, said the agency misses the point on the need for historians to have total access to as much information as possible.

"If you redact the names, we have no ability to look at pension records in the National Archives, we have no ability to go to their local town and look at the historical society records to find letters and files that are related to it," Warshauer said.

"Anything along that sort of bread trail, the crumbs that you look for in historical detective work, you have to have the name in order to ... fill out the entirety of the story."

"When I went forward to try to get these records from Connecticut Valley Hospital to research post-traumatic stress disorder, even at the time I didn't realize how important this research was in a contemporary sense," Warshauer said.

Rehmer said that individual and family medical privacy would be violated if the bill is passed. She said that redacting names would protect them.

"Even though the individuals in this House bill are deceased, we believe it could still be a problem for family members and I think what is equally important, it creates a system that is uneven," Rehmer said, adding that private psychiatric hospitals would have an advantage in protecting privacy.